FACT CHECKED
In today’s marketplace, you need to know the digital adoption implications of your actions — or lack of action.
Because they’re potentially lethal.
Companies must make adoption a priority to avoid negative consequences, like employee churn, poor performance, and a sad bottom line.
Managers in all departments must become familiar with the role user adoption has to play in order for the business to keep pace with competitors and maintain good team performance.
Everybody in today’s enterprises must know not only what digital tools they have to use, but also how to use them to their fullest extent.
Alarming digital adoption implications for enterprises
Digital technology is transforming how companies do things. But only if that technology is successfully adopted.
Digital adoption means achieving a state where digital tools become real assets because they’re being used as intended and to their fullest extent.
Lilach Bullock writes in Forbes that, whatever the technology (an app, system, or piece of software), enterprises must fully realize its potential and use it to its maximum capability. This is the definition of true digital adoption.
Also in Forbes, Bruce Roger talked with Michael Gale, an expert in digital transformation, about what percentage of companies are successfully transforming with the digital age.
Gale said that 84% of Fortune 2000 companies have failed in one way or another in successfully prioritizing the benefits of digital technology. More than half of these companies have failed to prioritize digital technology at all.
This is an alarming percentage of companies who are failing to realize the full benefits of digital technology.
Gale, a recognized expert in integrated marketing technology, believes the key ingredient to successfully avoiding negative digital adoption implications is for management to recognize the challenges that must be overcome.
Most failures to transform into the digital age are due to companies not fully navigating the challenges of adopting technology into company culture.
Employee burnout is on the rise in the corporate world
CBNC reports that in a recent Gallup poll, 23% of company employees experience continual burnout. 44% said they felt burned out some of the time from their jobs.
Employee burnout was defined by American psychologist Herbert Freudenberger in the 1970’s as total exhaustion or stress felt by those in the helping industries. This definition remains more or less unchanged today.
Employees cite two main causes of burnout:
- Having to respond to texts and emails after working hours, and
- An unmanageable workload.
Digital technology has to some degree brought about these serious issues because digital tools are enabling employees to work wherever and whenever. Because there’s more capacity to work, there are higher expectations placed on employees to achieve more and more.
Digital tools are a barrier to employee productivity and performance when they’re not fully integrated with other systems and applications. Enterprise technology must be fit for purpose and successfully adopted so as not to be a burden to the workforce.
Burnout has cost companies between 125 billion to 190 billion in employee healthcare spending, according to an article published in the Harvard Business Review. It’s a company challenge that needs addressing, and not an employee challenge.
Enterprises need to be aware of serious digital adoption implications such as these and act accordingly, or they will continue lose valuable employees.
Return on investment is gone with the wind
This is one of the most alarming negative digital adoption implications: companies are investing large sums of money in new technology and getting poor ROI as a result of unsuccessful adoption.
According to another article written in the Harvard Business Review, companies lose valuable ROI on digital technologies because they’re reacting to customer’s buying trends.
However, rolling out new technology reactively in response to customer buying patterns amounts to “too little, too late.” The pace of digital innovation is so fast, businesses need to be ahead of the curve when it comes to adoption — not behind it.
Companies need to be proactive in finding new ways to conduct digital business and lead customers through the buying process instead of reacting to it.
The bottom line
Companies need to be aware of the very serious digital adoption implications posing a threat to slow or complacent enterprises. Ignoring the digital revolution is a potentially lethal mistake. Just remember what happened to Blockbuster and Kodak.
Taking a forward-thinking approach to digital adoption is the only way to transform your business and out-live your competitors. You must proactively address these issues before they become problems and your bottom line bottoms out.
